CALCUTTAÂ -THE CITY THAT REFUSES TO DIEÂ Â
Nowhere else in India do people engulf you as they do in Calcutta. From the moment you step off your train or plane, and begin…
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Japanese says Indian bureaucracy very “inflexible”Â
24 July 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, July 24 (Reuter) – Japan is keen on expanding investment in India but…
CALCUTTA’S INDIANS TAKE ELECTIONS IN STRIDE
21 November 1989  Reuters News English (c) 1989 Reuters Limited Calcutta, Nov 21, Reuter – The six Bengalis splashing around a fire hydrant inches from…
Marxist says one-party rule in India is “finished”
 15 June 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited CALCUTTA, India, June 15 (Reuter) – India is not likely to see a return to…
CALCUTTA IS FOEVER
Thirty years ago, a dishevelled man leaned across and shouted at me in the smoke-filled, raucous Olympia bar on Calcutta’s Park Street: “Calcutta is forever!”…
Hello, Tomorrow
I had my epiphany on a Seoul subway in 2004. All around me, young men and women rode to work silently, mesmerised by television programmes…
BUREAUCRACY-THE POWER THAT BE
All private secretaries to Union ministers are equal, but S.R. Bhatia is more equal. Bhatia is the private secretary to Prakash Chand Sethi, the Union…
FINDING A VOICE
Politics cinema, like the new wave of the mid-’70s, has long acquired a pejorative meaning in India. At most, a political film that catches the…
Scrabbling Away From the Abyss
Nitish Kumar’s victory in last month’s Bihar election celebrates the triumph of economics over feudalism, but the climb out of poverty will be steep and…
VULTURE CULTURE
PSYCHOPATHY. VOYEURISM. SADISM. Schadenfreude. Vicarious pleasure. Blood lust. You will find several terms to describe the human tendency to find a strange satisfaction, indeed fulfilment,…